So far, I'm enjoying wandering around Barcelona much more than I did the streets of Paris. I'm not enjoying it quite as much as I thought I would, however. It turns out that Catalan is much more different than Spanish than I expected. The verbs of the two languages are often pretty close, but the nouns are where things start to diverge more and more. For instance, 'beverages' in Spanish/Castilian is 'bebidos'; in Catalan, 'begudes'. Given context, it's not terribly difficult to figure out in text, but when somebody is speaking at their normal rate, it's much, much more difficult. Los Barcelenos are also not used to people speaking poor Spanish or Catalan (or none at all); they don't modify their word use, they don't slow down, nada. (They also do not speak much English at all, compared to the other countries I've been in.) I was expecting far more usage of Spanish here; things are usually written in Catlan and only Catlan. While the ATMs and subways and whatnot have things written in Spanish, they have things written in English, too.
Also, my depression and gout also seem to be on the upswing; the former is probably exacerbated by the fact that while the pensión where I'm staying has almost zero natural light, which fucks with my sleep cycle something fierce.
